Amazon

I mentioned this in a comment over on John M Willis ESM Blog. I thought it deserved a post all to itself because I think it’s important.

One anxiety I have with hosting my websites is the bill I need to pay each month. There are many many hosting options out there, all with their own particular risk characteristics.

With the advent of on-demand cloud offerings like Amazon EC2 there are lot of new options. One of the characteristics of cloud offerings is easy scalability. Scalability does have a problem though, because your bill will scale too.

Terry Slattery has some suggestions as to how you can use Amazon’s cloud computing offerings in implementing network management

Interesting what Amazon is up to…first with cloud storage then cloud computing and now cloud databases. Is the art of data centre management going to be concentrated into a few massive data centres?

We currently rent a single Sun box, running Linux oddly enough, in a data centre to run all of our websites and email. One of the down sides with renting a machine is the limited capacity of storage, CPU and bandwidth. If you go the Amazon way then capacity becomes elastic. You can increase it when you need to and reduce when necessary.